


To learn and to love

by WatchforWitches



Category: Shadowhunters (TV), The Shadowhunter Chronicles - All Media Types
Genre: Falling In Love, Gen, Introspection, M/M, Magnus Bane Deserves Nice Things, POV Second Person, Poetry, nice things for everyone, so does anyone who reads this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-26
Updated: 2020-04-26
Packaged: 2021-03-01 22:48:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,165
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23854879
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WatchforWitches/pseuds/WatchforWitches
Summary: You feel like there must be something about him. Because how have so many others not loved you like this? How is this the first time you feel your busy heart still? After all this time?Somedays you feel your feral heart too strongly. You want to wrap him up with all your limbs and keep him there. Make him tell you all the ways that he thinks you were ever worth even looking at.
Relationships: Magnus Bane/Alec Lightwood
Comments: 2
Kudos: 17





	To learn and to love

**Author's Note:**

> Hey! This format is really experimental and comes from a random burst of creativity at like 6am with no sleep. I hope you enjoy nonetheless! The poem weaved throughout I also wrote, but a lot of the general emotions and feelings are inspired by random little poems and prose I have saved. It's basically a Magnus falling for Alec POV at the end of the day lol

_ Demons play behind your eyes  _

_ You’ve always been  _

_ Too much  _

_ For anyone’s good. _

On the easiest of days, you can revel in the life you live. Take stock of yourself in your home with your love, the one that stayed, the one that after all the agonizing years of loneliness has quieted the noise. You watch him lead with pride, listening to his steady voice of authority, the one only you know tremors when veiled by darkness and bedsheets. You smirk at him while he’s commanding all the soldiers that listen to him, he catches your eye and shakes his head minutely like he too can’t believe it. 

On the easiest of days, you don’t need to wonder why. 

On the hardest days? You feel your glamour like a film that burns at your eyes, shifting your focus the whole day. You can’t drop it, because of some unnameable shame that follows you even now. You wonder how someone like him could possibly love all the darkness that follows you. How someone so heavenly could look at you with anything but disgust. 

On the hardest days, you feel like crawling out of your skin. 

_ The angels have found you  _

_ In all your blood seethed rage  _

_ They have deemed you what you are  _

_ They have seen your truth.  _

You feel like there must be something about him. Because how have so many others not loved you like this? How is this the first time you feel your busy heart still? After all this time? 

Somedays you feel your feral heart too strongly. You want to wrap him up with all your limbs and keep him there. Make him tell you all the ways that he thinks you were ever worth even looking at. 

Was it the trauma? 

Surely not. You have lived many lives and learned that trauma is a more universal experience that any one sufferer is made to believe. You both share similar takes of it, but there must be more to it than that. There must be. 

He gave you a clean heart, he gave you all the firsts you can hardly recall having yourself. He gave you the cleanest version of himself because it was all he had. 

How did he take your patchwork heart in exchange? How did he see past all the carefully sewn together pieces of a persona you’ve built? How did he deconstruct all your walls, even the ones you hadn’t realized you had? 

He had so easily taken what you didn’t have to offer and made it into something, he crafted you into something new in a time when you were hardening and convinced you were no longer allowed to be something fresh. Your time had been done, and he had come and given you more. 

_ The unbridled truth you must face  _

_ Then  _

_ Is that you must forgive  _

_ Over and over and over  _

_ You must forgive them for all they are  _

_ You must forgive yourself for what you could not be.  _

You had always thought of love as an afterthought. Left pieces of yourself behind for someone to love after the fact, because you were younger or afraid. It was always something that was left easily to the wind. You spent so much youth romanticizing some ideal you forgot to actually look for it. 

That’s okay. You are certain you wouldn’t have found it before him anyways. 

The problem with love, real love, is that it is just as loud and furious as it is soft and kind. You must fight in love, and you were both expecting this and not expecting it. 

Falling in love with a Nephilim was never the plan. You lived through decades of hurt that they left on you and your people. You aren’t naive enough to think that everyone person is a representation of this, but he is naive enough to think that change could ever come easy. You remind him of the times you lived, the years of actions that have yet to have been undone. You remind him that change is small, you’ve seen small changes. His mother once would have preferred you dead than alive. His father once thought you an ugly inconvenience to be controlled and tamed. People can change. But a system? Systems rarely change. It makes him mad. His anger is misdirected at times. You scream at one another for tiny things to mask the larger issues that remain outside both of your control. 

These words have ended things in the past. You have abandoned relationships for less than the harshness you both misdirect at one another. You accept that things are uncontrollable, and you forgive yourself for having been young and foolish. You forgive him for being young and foolish. This is apart of the moments too, pages in the story. You tell him you want him to be more than a martyr for a cause not worth dying for, and it hurts him you know, but he promises you change, he promises you better. 

He promises you life. No one had ever made that kind of a promise and kept it, not with you, but you believe him. 

Your hurt heart heals against all odds. You learn that wounds can heal and still leave a scar and you learn to be okay with this. 

_ You will find life  _

_ In the strangest of places  _

_ In the wildest of people  _

_ You will live  _

_ And you will do it well.  _

Children laughing, warm breakfasts, crafts pressed into your palms with careful hands. It is never what you expected your life to become. 

But he’s always kept good on his promises, that love of yours. 

On the easiest days, you hold your children close to your chest and help them chase away their nightmares. You listen to your husband’s heartbeat steadily in his chest. You spin your wedding ring absentmindedly on your finger as if this too isn’t something you never could have had. Something that would have seemed so lifechanging decades ago now commonplace. 

On the hardest days, you hold your children close to your chest and they help you chase away all your nightmares they could never fathom. You listen to your husband’s heartbeat in his chest just to remind yourself that he is safe and he is here. You spin your wedding ring and remind yourself that in this small- but monumental- way that you are lovable. As if the piece of metal could ever fit everything he feels for you in it.

You don’t feel like crawling out of your skin anymore. You fit here, even when it’s hard. Here, with all this love, all the easy smiles and laughter, all the evidence that you are nothing shameful, that you never really were. 

The two of you are not really anything alike, but your hearts are made up of the same stuff. 

_ The homesickness you feel  _

_ Will go away  _

_ One day  _

_ Your soul will be understood  _

_ Someone will learn you  _

_ And love you.  _

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you enjoyed! Kudos/Comments/Feedback/Fic Requests are all welcomed! Stay safe <3


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